The invention relates to the field of decal manufacturing and use and provides a decal organization tool and process which solves a wide range of long existing and unaddressed problems.
Many products produced by industry are sufficiently complex, and sometimes even potentially dangerous to a customer, that numerous safety messages, warning signs, instructions and other notices must be affixed to the product before sale. In addition, most products carry signage on which the manufacturer is identified, its trademark and model numbers are set forth, and relevant patent numbers presented. In some situations, the signage will include decorative striping, manufacturer logos and the like. Typically such warning and information signs are associated with the product by a substantial number of individual decals which are applied to the product at appropriate locations on the product, and all such signage will be referred to hereafter as decals or decal messages. As examples of the types of products requiring multiple decal messages, hazardous products such as large tools and machines, construction equipment such as front-end loaders, tractors, stump grinders, lift trucks, highway construction vehicles and the like will commonly carry six to twenty-five or even more decal messages in accomplishing these purposes. If a manufacturer produces more than one product or model, the number of required individual signs used by the manufacturer may be multiplied by the number of products or models. If the product is sold in foreign language speaking countries, the number of signs may be multiplied again by the number of such foreign languages.
The importance of all such decal messages being applied to the product is high. In some product situations, failure to attach a key warning or instruction sign may result in serious customer injuries and substantial product liability damages being assessed against the product manufacturer. In recent years, increasingly stringent requirements established by OSHA have mandated that certain information and warning signs be present. Consequently it is now more important than ever that a manufacturer be certain that all the required warning and instruction signs be constantly in inventory and consistently applied to the product before shipment. Using the tools and processes of prior art decal manufacturing, it has not been possible to achieve such consistency, and human error is a frequent problem.
Generally all such signage has been applied to the product in the form of individual decal messages, and the decisions to create and place particular decal messages on a product are usually generated at different times and come from either government requirements or different business departments of the manufacturer, some messages being generated from the engineering department to assure that operating instructions are understandable, others coming from the marketing department to enhance the appearance and attractiveness of the product, and still others originating from legal departments to provide legal notices and to warn customers of potential dangers and avert later product liability losses.
Typically specific product signage needs are recognized gradually over a long period of time, and consequently the decal messages are ordered at different times as new needs evolve or are recognized, and no one person at the manufacturer's facility becomes involved in assessing the total picture of all decal messages used by the manufacturer or for compatibility or consistency among the decal messages. Decal purchase decisions generally result in multiple, isolated orders to one or more outside decal manufacturers who will seldom know anything more about the decal message or the reasons for it other than that the particular decal message has been ordered. The product manufacturer's purchasing director will seldom have time to concern himself with compatibility or consistency between existing decals, or the problem of reliable and consistent application of the decals to the product. The task of installing decals is usually assigned to the newest and least experienced employees, who are not qualified to assess a decal program. Often a minimum wage salary is paid to the installer of the decals on the theory that little skill is required for the job. However, any significant failure by this often new employee to affix all the critical decals to the product can result in staggering legal damages in the event of death or serious injury of a customer.
Generally most now used individual decal messages carry their own company stock number and are usually separately inventoried and separately restocked like all other machine parts by the product manufacturer's purchasing agent. As decal messages are used up and restocking occurs, individual suppliers of the decal messages begin to change, and the decals change in size, shape, and in color shades. Eventually the many decals used on a single product no longer have harmonious matching colors.
Size and shape differences in the corners of signage occur as a result of decals being manufactured at different times from different bidders. A first decal manufacturer may produce a particular decal with square corners. The next bidder may produce the same decal with corners featuring a quarter round having a particular radius. Later manufacturers may use a different radius with the quarter round. The result is increasing incompatibility between signage that comes together on a single product.
Although the manufacturer of a product generally wishes to have the colors of his signage be matching and aesthetically pleasing, as individual decals are reordered at various times and from changing suppliers, colors on new printed signs will inevitably evolve to shades and hues different from the original and the differences will be increasingly perceptible.
A more serious and frequently encountered problem with prior art decals is that of obtaining an aesthetically pleasing outer margin around the border of the decal message. Typically a decal message will include text which is centered within a line-style interior border or other interior border. A thermal die cut is made outside the line border and ideally should be spaced equally outward from the line border at all locations around the border. Because the vinyl material on which most decal messages are printed is flexible and stretchable, the material tends to flex, stretch and slip unpredictably during the thermal die cutting process. Consequently the cut has usually been nonparallel to the border or unevenly spaced relative to the border. The larger the size of the vinyl sheet the greater is the degree of stretching and slippage. The unpredictable nature of this stretching makes it extremely difficult to consistently produce such decals without also producing an irregular margin. When such a decal is applied to a product of some specific color, the decal margin generally forms a sharp contrast area with the product, and the interior line border on the decal and its irregular spacing from the decal edge is further emphasized Most manufacturers would prefer all decals used on their carefully finished machines to be aesthetically pleasing, provided with even and attractive margins, and compatible with one another. Currently manufactured collections of separate decals used with multi-decal products cannot consistently achieve these goals. The invention provides an effective and inexpensive solution to this long existing problem of irregular margins.
Still another problem encountered with the use of commercially available decals is that the process of applying the decals to the product is unnecessarily complicated, slow, and imprecise. Typically when a product, such as a tractor, may require thirty or more decals, the employee charged with decal installation will first obtain a list of required decals and then go to an inventory site to obtain the decals. This usually unskilled employee must gather each of the thirty or more decals from thirty or more separate decal storage files, check identification of each decal against individual decal stock numbers on the list, open protective envelopes to inspect stored decals, reject dogeared or otherwise damaged decals, and still try to be sure that all the right decals are quickly gathered for the specific product.
The employee then must carry this collection of individual decals to the site where the decals will be applied to the product, risking the possibility of one or more of the decals being lost or misplaced between inventory site and application site. The employee must peel off the release liner sheet on each of the many decals and constantly properly dispose of all of the many slippery individual liner sheets. The employee usually peels the decals in groups of six or eight for his convenience. To carry the sticky decals and keep them separate, he commonly temporarily affixes the decals to his person or his clothing while he walks to the product and applies each individual decal to the product.
It is known that each time a decal's adhesive comes in contact with a surface other than the final product mounting surface, the adhesive becomes contaminated by such things as dirt, dust, fibers or body oils. As much as 20% of the potential adhesion can be lost in this way. With a perfectly applied decal having a five year outdoor use life, each such unnecessary contamination may shorten that use life by a year. In effect, it is desirable that the decals go directly from the release liner sheet to the product with minimal extra handling or touching of the decal adhesive to other objects. The invention provides an effective solution to these problems by consolidating all the decals associated with a specific product or model on a single large decal organization tool sheet which can be brought as one unit to the application site.
Although it is known to consolidate all the miniaturized decals associated with certain toys, such as model airplanes, onto a single small liner, consolidating the many separate decals used for large tools or vehicles is not being done. The need for such improvement has gone unrecognized even in industries manufacturing products requiring extensive informational and legal liability warning signage. A consolidated sheet of decals has been possible on certain toys because the related decals are small, principally decorative and encounter few of the challenges associated with instructions or warnings on products of the type described herein. The toy buyer or model builder deals only with installing the decals on a single toy model and does not encounter the many problems and time constraints faced by a decal installer on an assembly line.
As applicant developed the present invention, he encountered difficulty with the problem of thermal die cutting the multiple removal cuts that must surround the multiplicity of decals on a single large vinyl sheet. Such problems are not significant with small sheets of the type used with toys and models. Because it is difficult to consistently center the removal cut on a stretching, flexing vinyl sheet with even a single decal, it is still more difficult when many cuts must be made simultaneously on a large sheet with many decals and which flexes and stretches much more than a single individual decal. The inability to create visually attractive margins about the many decals when combined on a large sheet was a challenge that had to be addressed by the inventor in order to provide decal messages having borders and margins whose aesthetic appearance was acceptable.
As an installer applies the many separate prior art decals to the product, at times the decals will need to be applied in close proximity to one another. This condition occurs most frequently at a product location that has parts which are potentially dangerous or on a control panel of a vehicle or machine, and as many as six or more individual decals may need to be applied in a relatively small area. As such decals are individually applied, the installer will rarely have the time to assure that all of the decals are aligned, parallel to one another, and properly spaced. Often the decals are skewed, misaligned, and unevenly spaced from one another, creating a sloppy or poorly finished look to an otherwise potentially attractive product. The invention provides a solution to this problem.
Another problem with prior art decals is that a product manufacturer has no effective way to prove that a critical decal message was placed on the product in the assigned location at the time the product was shipped. This issue arises when a product is later involved in a death or injury, and a claimant contends that an essential instructional or warning decal was negligently omitted from the product. At present, product manufacturers have no persuasive, economically feasible way of confirming that all the decals were present when the product was shipped. In addition, the possibility exists that a victim, after being injured by a product which was shipped with a complete collection of decals, may remove the relevant decal so as to enhance a claim for product liability against the manufacturer. With these concerns in mind, it is desirable that product manufacturers be able to prove at a later date that an essential but now missing decal was placed on the product at the time of shipment. Prior to the invention there was no known reliable and economically feasible mechanism which solved this problem.
It is known to utilize various anti-theft, tramper proof labels for the purpose of protecting the integrity of price tags, pharmaceutical labels, identification labels for original parts to distinguish them from stolen or counterfeit parts, and for motor vehicle identification label purposes, but such anti-theft labels are quite complex, expensive and their surfaces commonly self destruct if tampered with. The surface of a critical informational or warning decal may occasionally encounter rough field treatment while in normal use and such a decal could not be allowed to self destruct during normal use without creating new liability problems. It is known to impregnate the adhesive of such an anti-theft pricing label with an additive which leaves a stubborn invisible residue on the product to which it is bonded and wherein the residue can be visually detected by shining an ultraviolet light source on the residue, even after the label has otherwise been wholly removed. As the ultraviolet light reflects from the location to which the label was attached, the outline of the label appears as a glowing footprint, but is otherwise not visually detectable by an observer. Use of such an additive compound is helpful, but does not in itself provide a means by which it can later be proven that a specific warning or instructional decal was ever present and does not differentiate one decal from another. This technique of utilizing ultraviolet light and an appropriate light sensitive additive on anti-theft labels of specialized layer construction is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,346,259 issued Sep. 13, 1994 and entitled Anti-Theft Label Construction.
In some highly important identification situations, such as identifying stolen motor vehicles, it is known to utilize a label which leaves an ultraviolet footprint as described above, and wherein the label, before application to the product has the vehicle identification number cut into the label by means of a series of lines or dots burned through the label with a laser beam to produce a series of numerals. As a result, the label, when applied to the vehicle, forms an invisible residue on the vehicle surface at the label location except for the open spaces which form the numerals. When the label is subsequently removed by a car thief the vehicle identification number can still be detected by shining ultraviolet light on the location where the label was earlier present. When the ultraviolet light is shined on the label position, the label footprint appears with the vehicle number being defined by dots or spaces on the footprint. These represent the areas of the footprint which do not contain the residue and thus contrast with the rest of the label footprint which contains the residue.
While such a label may be practical for the critical identification of a costly motor vehicle, the label system is quite complex, expensive to utilize and too costly to be economically feasible in relatively low cost, low bidder decal markets. The cost of assigning specific matrix dot codes and the laser cutting of those codes into a decal would not be economically feasible. In addition, the cutting of the decal by the laser would often be aesthetically unacceptable, and in outdoor use such cuts would increase exposure of the decal's adhesive to weathering and shorten the use life of the decal. The invention provides a new and inexpensive way to reliably identify specific decals even after their removal from the product.